A typical problem encountered by mental health professionals consists of carrying out express diagnostics of a person's ideas about his/her past, present and future and, on this basis, drawing a preliminary conclusion about the presence of deformations in the subjective picture of the person's way of life, the degree of well-being of his/her present life situation and the risk of disturbing his/her psychological health.
One simple and reliable means for solving this problem is the method of estimation of five year intervals comprising the following: The person is asked to indicate the age to which he hopes to live and to estimate for every five year interval of his/her lifespan, including past and future intervals, the importance or significance to him/her of events occurring in each interval. Events for this purpose are considered to be any changes in environment, behavior and his/her internal world, and the person is instructed to apply point values from zero to ten to indicate event importance. A graph of life is obtained as a result of this testing and yields an objective picture of a person's way of life. The graph is typically a bar chart of the type illustrated in FIG. 1 wherein the horizontal axis represents time divided into successive five year segments of the person's life, and the vertical axis represents the point values of the events assigned by the person to each five year segment. This bar chart appears in the copyrighted article Kondrashev et at., Psycho-Biographical Analysis With APL (APL Quote Quad, Vol. 21, No 4, p. 245) and permission to use it herein has been granted by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
The test described above may be utilized to calculate an examinee's psychological age using the formula: PA=R×L, where PA is the examinee's psychological age, L is the age to which the examinee hopes to live, and R is the subjective realization of the examinee's life.
The subjective realization of life R may be calculated in any number of ways, one of which is a calculation of the ratio of the total of the past event point values to the total point values of the person's expected entire life. In other words, R=Ppast/Ptotal, where Ppast is the total of event point values assigned by the examinee to his/her life up to the present date, and Ptotal is the total of event point values assigned by the examinee for his/her entire lifespan. The value of R is thus a fraction with a maximum value of one (i.e., the extreme and unlikely case where all lifespan event points are in the past segments of the examinee's hoped for lifespan) and a minimum value of zero (i.e., the other extreme and unlikely case where all of the event points are in the future segments of the examinee's hoped for lifespan). Larger values of R represent a point of view wherein the past is more significant to the individual, thus making the person's psychological age PA older; such an individual feels older and has an older person's outlook. Smaller R values, on the other hand, yield younger psychological ages, and such individuals tend to have a brighter and more optimistic outlook on life. Thus, the computed psychological age PA of a person is often considered in connection with that person's chronological age to provide a measure of the person's sense of contentment, self worth, outlook on life or other important psychological characteristics.
It is desirable to provide a visual indication of chronological age and psychological age from which a comparison of these parameters can be made and readily understood.